Mike Griffiths

Another milestone. Football Badges has now reach 50,000 active users. This is the largest Facebook application that I have created to date.

I will be releasing a new Facebook app in the next few days. It has some functionality and will hopefully keep users coming back to use the application, whereas Football Badges is a sort of one-off thing. Keep your eyes peels and the feed subscribed to!

In the past I have used several different online ad platforms for a little bit of advertising here and there, but the two that I (along with the majority of e-marketers) prefer is Google AdWords. Recently I have begun using Google AdWords more heavily.

There is a lot of hype about Google AdWords and how it can work wonders for your website. I’m not entirely sure I could agree with that. Google definitely have the biggest audience for the ads, but that doesn’t mean it’s better value for money, or whether the audience is more targetted.

Facebook Ads is the Ad management tool for displaying ads on Facebook, and personally my favourite ad platform. Due to Facebooks nature the customisation of the Facebook ad’s is phenominal. I recently launched an advert for one of my Facebook applications (you can advertise anything*) that is designed for Baseball fans. I was able to tell Facebook that I only wanted to display the advert for users who are in the USA (where the Facebook app is hosted) and who are fans of Baseball and like some Baseball TV shows. This was a great help as it meant maximum exposure. Having said that, it doesn’t neccessarily mean I’ll save any money…

Pay per click is what it says… you pay every time someone clicks your ad. Google AdWords is pay per click. Facebook allows you to run campaigns on a pay per click or a pay per impression basis. This gives huge amounts of flexibility and allows you to save money depending ont he type of advert. If I was advertising a car insurance company then I’ll want to have it display to a large number of people, so I’d run pay per click, only paying if someone clicks through. But if I was advertising a car insurance promotion that only female students aged 21 or above, attending university in the UK, then I can easily drill down to only have the advert display to girls in 3rd year of uni or above who live in the UK – it’s then much cheaper to pay per impression, as less people will see it, but the one’s that do see it are more likely to click. Facebook also tells you how many users it has meeting this criteria.

Facebook is also MUCH cheaper than Google. I recently ran a campaign for the project Downtime Preventer. The average cost per click on Google was over £5. The average cost per click on Facebook was £0.05. You can see that this is a massive difference in price. However, the reason Google excels is the amount of traffic it receives. It took me a month to get through £15 on Google, for ‘downtime’ related keywords, hardly worth doing. On Facebook it was quite difficult to pick specifics for the campaign, so ended up going for ‘All users with their on company page’, hoping that would be small business owners.

Another plus Facebook has over Google are the ads themselves. Google is text-based only. Facebook allows more characters and one small image. The Facebook ads are subtle enough to not disturb the user but allow the advertiser to get their point across more easily.

Although my preference is definitely with Facebook, Google has it’s plus points. Facebook can only be used for so much before Google comes into it’s own. If you’re advertising a huge campaign then Facebook just won’t cut it, the audience just isn’t the same. The Downtime Preventer example is a good one, as it goes to show how difficult it can be to advertise something niche.

The bottom line is this: Google knows what people might be looking for and displays your advert, Facebook will display ads that people might like.
If you remember that golden rule then you’ll probably make the right choice.

Similar to Football Badges I have just released Baseball Badges. The ideal is exactly the same, you add the application to your Facebook profile and it will display your favourite teams badge. Most major league teams are listed but more can be added on request.

Baseball Badges

The title says it all, really. Football Badges has hit the 2,000 members mark and is still going strong. It actually jumped up by 150 since the last time I checked a few days before.

Check it out if you haven’t already. And if you like this then have a look at Football Feeds too.

Football Badges

As you may be aware from reading this blog I have recently been using the Facebook Framework to develop two applications, Football Badges and University Badges. At time of writing both applications are doing reasonably well – Football Badges has 1,100 users and University Badges has 30 – but University Badges was only accepted into the application directory a few days ago.

While using the framework the main issue I found with it, as with a lot of frameworks and APIs, is the distinct lack of documentation. I have experience developing with a lot of different web applications, and it’s never normally a suprise to find something poorly documented, but I thought something as mainstream as the Facebook Framework would be an exception. Although there is documentation available, it is in the form of a wiki – which can work fine, but this wiki is clearly not maintained very well and is left up to developers to guess a lot of the frameworks functionality. Take for example the page that is aimed at helping developers to create a box on users profile pages, the majority of the wiki page is taken up by a huge conversation had on the Facebook IRC help channel on Freenode where a user was trying to update their profile box. Where this may be a little helpful, it’s highly unprofessional. All Facebook needs to do is to donate a few days of one of their framework developers time to properly write up the documentation and they will likely attract hundreds of new developers and successful applications.

One problem I have also found with the framework is the way it handles user profiles. Everything is cached on Facebook’s servers before it is shown on the users profile page, this greatly limits the kind of applications that you can create. For example, if I want to create an application that keeps track of how many visitors a user has had on their profile, I would normally display a 1×1 transparent gif and track how many times it is loaded from my server, but because everything is cached on Facebook’s servers it will only ever be loaded once from my server. You can only use set HTML items too, I fully understand the reasoning for this, as otherwise applications would go overboard and Facebook would soon turn into MySpace, but perhaps Facebook could grant additional privledges to trusted developers to try and enhance the users experience.

Another problem is that users must actively choose to add an application to their profile page. This is probably for the best as otherwise all applications would add huge boxes to user profiles to generate more traffic. It does, however, pose problems for applications like mine that are based around the profile page. It can be very mis-leading to a user, let me explain: A user see’s my application and adds it. Any normal user would now think they have a Football Badge on their profile page, they’d be wrong. The user then has to click the ‘Add to profile’ button on my applications pages. I have made it blindingly obvious what to click to try and ensure 100% of my users do it, but it does divert attention away from the application itself and is an unnessesary step for applications like mine.

I have also noticed some problems with the frameworks deployment. My applications are relatively small in comparison to a lot of the applications out there, but I too have noticed problems. The servers don’t seem to be kept up-to-date, especially recently. I have around 1,100 users on my Football Badges application, normally I get around 15 new users a day. Last week there were reported to be no new users, then this week there were 150 users added in a day. I doubt this is an anomally, especially after scanning the forums and finding a lot of others having the same problem, some of whom are developing applications with millions of users, not thousands.

A lot of people have raised concerns about privacy issues with the platform. Anyone can apply for a developers license and it’s all automated so there is no vetting. You only need 20 users in order to submit the application to the app directory so that it is searchable and addable by all. Once you have your developer key you gain access to nearly every piece of data Facebook has on their users, this seems like a massive concern. However, I don’t see it that way. Users must grant privledges to the application before it can access anything. The user can also limit what the app can see and use. Even if the user grants the application full access, it will only be able to use what friends can see on their profile so for the majority of users, this isn’t even an issue. I can, however, see a problem for the security conscious. Facebook allows users to pick whether their profiles are crawlable or not by Google and other search engines. I personally chose to hide mine. If an application is granted privledges to access that user data there is no telling what they can do with it. The developers can easily create an application that stores your information on their servers when you access one of their application’s pages and there is no way of stopping them.

With all that said the Facebook Framework is very fersatile and does allow developers access to user data in a relatively safe way. The amount of applications that could be developed are endless, even with the profile restrictions in place, and the platform has paved the way for many new businesses. I myself have made money from these two small applications, so it clearly works. I just hope that Facebook decides to put some time into their documentation sooner rather than later.

After the success of the football badges application I thought I might branch out a little. I have created the ‘Uni Badges‘ application. Essentially it’s exactly the same as the football badges application, only it displays your university badge rather than your favourite football team’s.

I don’t for one second think that this will be as popular as the football badges but it will be interesting to see the contrast in active user levels between the two. At time of writing this application only has 19 users, which isn’t enough to submit the application to the public listing directory – so unless someone knows where to look, they’ll never find it. Hopefully someone will add it soon so I can submit the application. You can get it on it’s application page on Facebook.

Uni Badges – Display your university’s crest/emblem/badge on your Facebook profile

Facebook is a huge website that, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 3 years, you will have heard of. The original concept was simple; everyone has an account and can add pictures, users can then comment on other users profiles and pictures. This is the theory of social networking. It’s a very simple idea and a lot of sites have tried copying it, with not a lot of success.

More recently though the Facebook platform was released. This is essentially a framework that allows developers access to the data on Facebook, but of course the user has to agree to allow access to this data on a per-application basis.

There have been all sorts of success stories in the press about applications built on the framework so I thought I’d give it a go. I wanted something simple that would allow me to get knee deep into the framework straight away, but not cause me too much stress. I chose to create ‘football badges‘.

The idea is a simple one. The user adds the application and can select their favourite football team from a drop-down list (which is pulled from my database), this in turn will display that teams emblem / badge on that users profile page. Easy.

I have mixed opinions about the platform and it definitely needs a lot of work, but as a whole it is an excellent development medium and I’m sure there will be a lot of useful applications cropping up sooner rather than later.

As of writing my application had over 900 active users – which is quite impressive considering it’s only been live a week or so. Let’s hope it’s growth continues and I’m able to make at least some money from it! You can add the application from it’s ‘about page‘ on Facebook.

Football Badges Application – Add your teams badge to your profile